I have some hindi fonts in my linux (they even work in vim, when I try to to view some downloaded hindi webpages).
Now, in gimp, it does show various multilingual fonts (hindi as well as others). However, when I try to use them, it displays only english text :(

hmmm, not sure what you mean. But I did select the appropriate "font" from the text toolbar. tried various non-english fonts. My keyboard is english, so I assume it should do some phonetic conversion like most multi-language editors?
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janMar 16 '11 at 10:27